Incomplete now, but I’ll try to update this when I am feeling up for it.

Interests

I’d say most of my interests are centered around the mind in some form or another.

Cognitive Science

While we’re on the subject of the mind I should probably mention that I’m an undergraduate studying cognitive science at an undisclosed small liberal arts college. This is an incredibly broad field so it’s difficult to elaborate on exactly what this entails, but generally you can think of it as anything theory of mind or 4e cognition related.

The mind is more than the brain

One question which has become central to modern developments in theories of cognition rests on what exactly constitutes the mind. What is the mind able to use as an epistemic vessel for cognitive processes? This is where contemporary theories come in (I personally prefer the term movements over theories for reasons I may get into elsewhere but common courtesy dictates I stick to convention). In the broadest meaningful sense, I’d say what unites modern research into theories of cognition comes from an increased focus on the mind as more than just our physical brains. Concretely, this is demonstrated by research into intersubjectivity and social cognition among psychologists, and the integration of extended mind and other derivatives of 4e cognition into cognitive science and philosophical considerations of the mind.

Phenomenology

Phenomenology is the study of conscious experience. It is one of the few disciplines that does not take for granted the existence of a physical reality. Instead it asks, what must consciousness be like in order to experience reality in the way that we do. Notably this does not necessitate that the experienced reality in question exists outside of our experiencing it, only that there is something being experienced and this something is what we call reality, regardless of its physicality.

Lifeworlds

The lifeworld describes the world of conscious experience as it is pre-given to us. Our experiencing of the world is an active process, but there must always be a part of experience which is not the subject of an intentional act, rather it is taken as the passive foundation by which intentional acts are carried out. We make this distinction between accessible life experiences, and the backdrop by which those experiences depend on and which deliver them to our conscious experience pre-given with form, content, and meaning.

Bayesian Brain and Its Implications

My interest here tangentially emerged from my time immersed in computational neuroscience. I could never really connect with all the abstract molecular modeling, and “what does this have to do with the human condition” was something I struggled to answer. The Bayesian brain hypothesis stuck out to me initially as a multi-level heuristic because of its wide applicability. It makes sense that our brain is designed to optimize the integration of new sensory data; but it was not immediately obvious to me what the primary focus of this optimization was. Put differently: what is the goal of cognition? This is not an easy question as I’ve come to learn, and I’d argue that it constitutes one of the major points of contention among the theories’ proponents.

The Free Energy Principle

Proposed by Karl J. Friston, the free energy principle refers to a mathematical formulation of “thingness”. I believe the introduction of a Markov blanket as the boundary of a things existence may allow us to develop a more rigorous ontology of what constitutes a spatiotemporally stable bounded thing. While I’m off in crazy town I’ll also say that I see no reason why Markov blankets can’t be used to delineate abstract concepts. The boundary of abstract concepts has always seemed to befuddle epistemologists, and I suspect the free energy principle may be able to provide insight into the nature and evolution of such boundaries.